Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/172

 CHAPTER VI

THE SECOND FRENCH WAR

In 1756, when a rupture with France over the North American colonies was imminent, George II, to save Hanover, made a treaty of alliance with Frederick of Prussia, against whom the Austrian empress, Maria Theresa, had prepared an overpowering hostile coalition. Fortunately for England, the French government, then under the sinister influence of Madame de Pompadour, was persuaded into a rash and unwise conjunction with the Austrians; so that during the war France had to meet the Prussian army on land and the English navy at sea, a very formidable amphibious combination. From the beginning of the year 1756 both the English and the French in India had been expecting war, and each side had been protesting against the other's breaches of Godeheu's treaty; so that when, toward the year's end, news arrived of an open rupture in Europe, the effect was merely to substitute formal hostilities for the indirect skirmishings and threatening manoeuvres that the two Companies had been carrying on in the Karnatic. But as most of the English troops had been despatched with Clive to Bengal, and as the